What you want in Life (Part 2) #shorts

If you have ever wondered why entrepreneurs work longer hours than salaried employees, the answer is not about hustle culture or ego. It is about the size of the prize you are chasing, and whether the person next to you is even chasing the same thing.

Direct Answer: Entrepreneurs work 16 to 18 hours a day because they are not working for a salary. They are working for an outcome that is many times larger than what an employee is paid to deliver, which is why expecting an employee to match an entrepreneur's hours is a category error, not a motivation problem.

The Real Reason Founders Work 16 to 18 Hour Days

I might be crazy. I might be mad. I might be insane to want so many things out of my life. That is exactly why I am putting in this insane number of hours into my work. But here is the thing I had to learn the hard way as a Chartered Accountant who walked away from a stable career to build an education business serving 79,000+ students across 74+ courses: the hours are not the input. The wanting is the input. The hours are just what falls out of the wanting.

If you want a private jet, a private island, a holiday house in three countries, a business that touches a million students, you cannot fund that ambition on eight hours a day. The math does not work. So the hours expand to fit the dream.

Why Your Team Will Never Match Your Hours (And Should Not)

This is the part that breaks most first-time founders, including me in my early years. You sit at your desk at 11pm wondering why your team logged off at 6pm. You feel resentful. You feel alone. You feel like nobody cares as much as you do.

They are not crazy. They are not mad. They are not insane. They do not want to buy a private jet. They do not want to buy a private island. They are not lying awake at night thinking about market share or product roadmaps. They are working for their salary. You are working for something much, much, much, much more.

• Your eight-hour employee gets paid for eight hours of attention.
• Your sixteen-hour self gets paid in equity, optionality, and the chance to build something that compounds for decades.
• The two are not the same job, even if you sit in the same office.

The Math: 18 Hours Versus 9 Hours

Let me put numbers on this, because I am a CA and numbers are how I think. If I put in 18 hours and my team member puts in 9 hours, that is not a 2x gap. It is a structural difference in what each of us is paid to produce.

I am paid in business outcomes: revenue, students enrolled, books shipped, partnerships closed. They are paid in hours of skilled work. If they finish their nine hours and the marketing campaign is done, that is exactly what was on the contract. Asking for the eighteenth hour is asking them to switch from being an employee to being a founder, without any of the upside of being a founder.

Stop Complaining. Start Sorting.

The fastest way to drain energy from your business is to spend it being upset that other people are not as obsessed as you are. I tried this for years. It poisoned every team I built.

The shift is simple, and I now teach it to every coaching client and consulting client I take on through sawankr.com:

• It is your business. The 18 hours are for you, by you, because of what you want.
• It is their job. Their 9 hours are for them, by them, in exchange for the salary they signed up for.
• Do not complain. Do not have a problem with their hours. They never agreed to want what you want.
• Keep them happy. A team that finishes at 6pm and is paid fairly will deliver more than a resentful team you guilt into staying till 10pm.

What This Looks Like Inside My Day

From Dubai, where I run my consulting practice, my actual day is split into three buckets. I share this with my coaching clients because most founders confuse activity with leverage:

• Six hours of deep, founder-only work — strategy, partnerships, content I personally create, decisions only I can make.
• Six hours of building the machine — courses, books, automations, GoHighLevel funnels, the assets that earn while I sleep.
• Four to six hours of leadership and learning — team reviews, content consumption, deliberate thinking.

My team does none of this. They run their nine hours inside their lane, and that is exactly the right design. If they were running my eighteen, I would not have a team — I would have eighteen tired versions of me.

The Founder's Mindset Shift That Changes Everything

The day you stop expecting your employees to be founders is the day your business starts to scale. Until then, every hire feels like a disappointment. After that, every hire feels like a unit of leverage.

If you are putting in 18 hours, that is for you. If they are putting in 8, that is fine. They get what they get from putting in their hours. You get what you get from putting in yours. Do not mix the two ledgers.

This single mindset shift — separating your ambition from their employment — is one of the most freeing lessons I have learned in 15+ years of building businesses, training 79,000+ students, and coaching founders out of the resentment trap.

The summary: stop trying to make them want what you want, and start using their fair hours to free your insane hours for the work only you can do. Today's next step: open your calendar and label every meeting either F (founder-only) or D (delegatable). Anything labelled D should be off your plate inside 30 days.

Source: Vendor pricing pages (lifebookonline.com, strategiccoach.com), Amazon retail pricing — verified May 2026. AED conversion at 1 USD = 3.67 AED.